I finished the first draft.

My husband defended his dissertation.

I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.

The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.

My marriage is better than it ever was.

There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.

Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.

Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.

Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.

We live in a lovely house.

Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.

I am a writer.

I can transcend.

I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Tags: Thanksgiving, luck, thankfulness, gratitude, Joan Armatrading, Pets

Part I: The visit

Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.

I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon:  develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.

Part II: Resonance

OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.

Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.

I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.

But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.

Tags: family, family visits, holidays, NaNoWriMo, Round Robin, Thanksgiving, writing prompt

Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling Stone.

The centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year. Kevin had caught it himself, straight from the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and onion, and there were mashed potatoes, cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans on the side.

We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about politics as usual. I wish I could go back and capture those conversations, remember the deep level jokes and high level discussions. Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin was devoted to real conversation and humor, sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was the closest we ever came to feeling like a family.

Like the night a couple of years before Kevin got sick, when he was just starting his PhD program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a puppy. I had taken the train from DC to Wilmington to visit and things were unusually smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, garlicky and herby and delicious.

The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin had taken a year off from college in 1966 after being busted for selling marijuana (a setup, he claimed) and he headed off to California, hitchhiked down the coast. He talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones fans. There was talk of high school dances, the moves and the moments. The radio was playing music from that era and he and Mom started to slow dance as I watched from the table.

What do you do when a family culture dies? When a powerful personality disappears? The center did not hold. We’re still trying to create our own gravity.

Tags: Kevin, Thanksgiving, meals, existential angst